Title Meanings
The cover to Welcome To New York, a 1970s Rolling Stones bootleg, is a cartoon by William Stout, showing the Stones against a grafitted wall which includes the phrase "50,000,000 flies can't be wrong - eat shit!"
The title is itself a reference to the hit song of 1927, "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong", by Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher, most notably performed by Sophie Tucker. It is also supposed to be an estimate of the number of singles that Presley sold worldwide by late 1959.
Its evolution of the phrase into a snowclone – as expressed in the Simpsons pastiche "Fifty million smokers can't be wrong," for example – ironically ridicules argumentum ad populum, the misconception that popularity or consensus equals validity.
Read more about this topic: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong
Famous quotes containing the words title and/or meanings:
“It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The first green night of their dreaming, asleep beneath the Tree,/God said, “Let meanings move,” and there was poetry.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)